The design of your website is one of the most important parts. It should be a must on your business strategy plan and you should offer it an adequate level of attention. When people access a website, the design is the factor that influences them to stay or walk away. Thus, if a website looks bad or has poor design elements, no one will even bother looking at what you have to offer. In other words, website design can be a deal-breaker if it is not done right.
Unfortunately, some website designers are trying to take advantage of this fact and make an instant profit, without offering the quality they promised. What does this mean? It means that you will end up spending good amounts of money, out of your budget, without getting the website design you wanted or getting a website design at all. The following tips are specially picked to help you avoid getting burned when looking to hire a website designer.
Do you know the tasks a website designer should accomplish?
Don’t rely entirely on the website design to know what tasks need to be done to make your website functional. Knowing what you need to complete a website and make it presentable will allow you to come up with an adequate budget. In other words, you’ll be more aware of the sums worthy of spending on what your website needs, rather than allowing the website designer to choose this for you. This way, it will be hard for someone to take advantage of your lack of knowledge on the subject.
So, do you know what you need? If you are a small business and you need a website, developing more than six pages is not necessary. This means you will need an About Us page, a Homepage, a page for services or products, a Landing page, Contact Us section and a page with testimonials. Later on, once your business develops, you’ll be able to scale your website as well. But, for the moments, it is not worth spending money on what you don’t currently need.
There’s also the case where you already have a website, with the basic pages, which requires just a little updating. This usually means, these days, adding a blog section and making the website mobile-friendly. Of course, refreshing its overall design is also a good thing, especially if you haven’t done any kind of updating for a couple of years. For instance, a team of web designers from agencies such as Modern Web Media can easily help you bring your website to date and add all the elements that are trending and highly appreciated these days.
Research sites that activate in the same niche as you do
It is very easy to make yourself clean to a web designer if you can provide actual examples of how you want your website to look. This is why it is not such a bad idea to look for websites that activate in the same domain as your business. Do some research and find those that you like best. Of course, no one says to copy their design, but pointing out the kind of details you would like your website to have is one way to make sure the final results will suit you.
If you do find a website you like, make sure you write down precisely what kind of details you consider as suitable and desirable. This will help you obtain an overview of how you want your business’s website to look like, especially when you find desirable details on several websites. Besides writing down your observations, make sure to retain the link to the page you like as well. Providing all this information to the web designer you hire will certainly cut down the time and costs necessary to put together an entire website.
Know the real costs of hiring a website designer
Being aware of how much money a website designer can charge for an hour of work, for example, is one way to prevent you and your budget from getting burned. However, it is worth mentioning that the hourly rate of a website designer can vary in a rather great deal. This depends on the level of skills and experience of the website designer and the difficulty of the provided tasks. Thus, the hourly rate of a website designer can range between $15 and $100 for every hour of work. On average, you should be able to find rates between $45 and $75 without too much effort.
But, how will you know how many hours of work are needed for your website? And how to tell if the hourly rates of a web designer reflect his or her skills? Here we go back to the complexity of the tasks you need to be accomplished in the case of your website. You see, it is possible to get an entire website for as low as $400, but the quality of the website may not be as desired. For an hourly rate of $60, a website designer may charge $720 for the six-page website we talked about earlier.
But this price tag may go up with an additional $300 if he needs to develop the entire design of the website. And, of course, you can find designers that will charge $80 per hour. So, you’ll be charged even more for a website, but the skills of the designer may worth the money, as there are higher chances to get the website you dreamt about.
Look for a website designer in the right way
When searching for the best website designer in your case, there are some aspects worthy of your consideration. First of all, make sure you clearly know what you want for your website. When you have the list of things you need to be done, find a website designer capable of handling those tasks.
It’s no point in hiring a web designer that is not capable of delivering up to your expectancies. But don’t hire the web designer without asking or looking for some references. Ideally, you should be able to see what former clients have to say about his or her work and behavior. So, don’t hesitate to ask for references prior to hiring any web designer. And, finally, check to see whether the rates of the web designer fit your designated budget for the job.
Kim Marks 
Nicola Holder